Robots for making shoes and clothing could eliminate 9 million jobs in Southeast Asia, pushing whole regions into poverty.

Companies first moved these jobs from the US and Europe to poor countries where they could pay workers very little, and now will eliminate the jobs entirely.

In the past, advancing technology created new jobs while eliminating other jobs. The net result was to pay workers more. No longer: technology is eliminating so many jobs that there cannot be a real replacement.

A socialist world government could solve the problem by reducing working hours so that more people would be employed, and by taxing the rich people that own the robot factories. However, today's plutocratist governments will serve those owners instead of the unemployed poor.

A truck driver killed 84 people in France by driving through a crowdcelebrating the birth of the French Republic. It isn't certain why he did this, but Islamist terrorism seems plausible.

Judged as a crime, this one was heinous. Considered as a cause of death, it remains minor. For comparison's sake, cars and trucks kill around 275 people in France each month through accidents.

People of France, don't panic! You don't away your freedom because of road accidents, so please don't throw it away because of this.

Opposition politicians are criticizing President Hollande for failing to do the impossible.

He is responding to this idiotic criticism by saying he will try harder to do the impossible -- stepping up harmful, misguided "security" measures.

France can't stop individual suicide attacks through snooping, intimidation and persecution of Muslims. But it can discourage them, with a united society that condemns these killers as the enemy of everyone.

Businesses that provide services people want in a hurry can get themselves to the top ranking in local Google Maps searches, just by paying for fake reviews saying they are great. Sometimes the companies listed are entirely fake, and people who call get passed along to some other company for the service; that company may intentionally skimp and do a bad job.

One positive side effect of my refusal to run nonfree software is that I'm totally safe from this. Google Maps requires the visitor to run nonfree Javascript code, so it simply does not work for me.

China has a new form of disappearing people: giving false information about their whereabouts. Officials say that Zhao Wei has been released from prison, but no one can find her. They say she went to her parents' home, but it is empty.

Perhaps they imprisoned her parents too, and their "home" is another prison.

After cancelling nearly all of the UK's policies that aimed to curb global heating, the Tories are now abolishing the department which had the mission of curbing global heating.

The remaining activities are to be transferred to another department for which carbon emissions and the environment are a side issue. This is a way to cause the remaining policies, those not cancelled yet, to be ignored.